1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments relate to an apparatus and method for providing a home network service, and more particularly, to an apparatus and method for providing a home network service to provide a user with various services by connecting devices with web interfaces to the Internet.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, due to a wide use of a Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology, home electronic devices, for example, refrigerators, washing machines, or rice cookers have been expected to be connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi interfaces and to provide users with various services. As an optimum solution to provide the various services, a Hypertext Transfer Protocol as a web protocol may be used. However, because the HTTP is based on a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), it is difficult to operate the HTTP in Micro Controller Unit (MCU)-based hardware. To solve the above issue, the Internet Engineering Task Force Constrained RESTful Environments (IETF CoRE) working group has standardized a Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) that is a lightweight web-based protocol. Here, “RESTful” refers to a Representational State Transfer (REST) architecture. However, because the CoAP is based on a User Datagram Protocol (UDP), an issue of message transfer reliability in an Internet environment may occur. To this end, the IETF CoRE working group has proposed a model of utilizing the CoAP in a local network and utilizing the HTTP in an Internet network.
Despite an effort to provide a user with a network service by connecting various home electronic devices to the Internet, it may be difficult for a user who is unfamiliar with the Internet or electronic devices to initial set an electronic device, for example, to connect the electronic device to the Internet and register the electronic device. To this end, a middleware protocol technology for management and control of various devices has been developed. However, use of the middleware protocol technology is limited due to complexity of a network environment and complexity of implementation.